We Are All Burning at The Actors Company

In 1812, thousands of English workers took up hammers and marched into the night to destroy the machines they believed were stealing their futures.

More than two hundred years later, as artificial intelligence reshapes industries around the world, their story feels eerily familiar.

We Are All Burning, a new play by Los Angeles native Travers Tobis, comes to the Hollywood Fringe Festival this June with a timely question: What happens when progress leaves people behind?

Set during the height of the Luddite uprising, the play follows a group of young men returning home from war to find their jobs disappearing, their community unraveling, and the rules of their world changing faster than they can understand. As tensions rise, they are driven into an escalating conflict with the town they once called home, forcing them to choose between submission, resistance, and survival.

Far from the caricature history remembers, the Luddites were not anti-technology zealots. They were workers confronting a world transformed overnight without their consent—a struggle that echoes today’s debates surrounding automation, artificial intelligence, and economic displacement.